Page 76 of Ruin
"Did you ever really love me? Or was that you manipulating me too?"
The question hits harder than any bullet could.
I look at her—broken and beautiful and holding a gun like she was born to violence—and tell her the only truth that matters.
"Loving you was the first real thing I'd done in years. Everything else was business. You...you were personal."
Then I walk away, leaving her standing in the doorway with my collar around her throat and her father's gun in her hands, knowing that the next time I see her, one of us probably won't survive the encounter.
The war between us is just beginning.
11
SELENE
Ihaven't slept.
The gun is on the nightstand where I left it after he walked out.
My father's .38, six rounds still chambered, barrel still warm from being pointed at the chest of the man I love.
Loved. Love. I don't know which tense applies anymore.
The ceiling of my apartment has a crack in it that runs from the light fixture to the corner above my closet.
I've been staring at it for six hours, mapping its path the way I've spent the last week mapping the path of a murderer through my life.
Both routes are jagged. Both lead nowhere good.
Dawn comes in pale and gray through the curtains I forgot to close.
The evidence wall catches the early light, and for a second, all those photographs and documents and red-ink connections look almost beautiful.
Like art. Like one of the pieces in his galleries, hung for show while the real business happens behind the frame.
I need to move.
I need to shower, eat, function like a person who hasn't just had her entire reality dismantled by the man who built it.
The bathroom mirror is still cracked from where I threw my father's coffee mug two nights ago. My reflection stares back at me in fragments. Fitting.
The collar is still on.
I touch it the way I've touched it a thousand times, fingers finding the diamonds automatically, tracing the warm metal along my collarbone.
My body knows this collar the way it knows breathing, and the familiarity of it makes my throat close.
I can't get it off.
The clasp is locked, has always been locked, and the key is wherever Cassius keeps the things that belong to him.
In a safe. In a drawer. Somewhere in that penthouse where I slept beside him and whispered that I loved him and didn't know I was lying in the bed of the man who orphaned me.
The shower is too hot.
I turn it that way on purpose.
Let the water scald my skin until it's pink and stinging, and I scrub with a washcloth until my arms are raw.
